“A thousand years ago, the first age of man
came to an end by the meeting of a sword and a shield. They were
destined to meet on the field that will forever be known as the
Plain of Tears. But unbeknownst to either warrior, the sword and
shield had destinies of their own.”

Like a dance of prisms in a window breeze, Dungeon
Siege II envelops your senses with a world of glittering color and
constant movement. In fact, the game almost begs a replay so you can
appreciate your surroundings without devoting your attention to the
frenetic game play. Tattered flags and individual tree leaves wave
in the wind over the grassy terrain as you make your way through the
short in-game tutorial that begins your play. As you make your way
through the canyon, there are jagged rocks, blood spatters, injured
enemies on military cots, dust flying from artillery impact, and
flames with realistic sparks here and there from sustained hits. You
can hear the offscreen sounds of battle, even while you hear the
wind shrieking through the canyon, as you meet your first foes.
Later in the game you will be able to gaze upon a mesmerizing
waterfall, and soothe your tired fingers while you rest in a lovely
grotto. Are the graphics state of the art to rival Morrowind? Not at
all. But the level of detail and color makes for an enjoyable forty
to sixty hour romp.

You begin the game as a mercenary, and are soon
betrayed by the master to whom you sold your sword. The evil Valdis
becomes your nemesis and his destruction your end goal. Your brief,
ill-fated allegiance will come to haunt you throughout the game, as
your motives and honor are questioned time and again. Left for dead
on the battlefield, you are found and imprisoned by the
tree-dwelling Dryads. A strange intervention on your behalf allows
you the opportunity to prove your worth and gain your freedom. What
follows takes you through lush forests to sandy deserts to
shimmering snowscapes in an effort to defeat the evil that threatens
the world, paralleled by your character’s growth from a
self-centered mercenary to an altruistic hero.

You can’t do this alone of course, and along your
journey you have the opportunity to add other characters to your
party. Seeking the perfect party combination at any given time is
part of the fun, as one character may make the difference in your
success or failure in one region, and incur the opposite result in
another. Your first time through the game, you are allowed three
companions, although you must pay for the third and fourth member to
join your party (and gold is scarce in the beginning of your
travels). Each character has different strengths and liabilities,
and differs from every other character in personality. Each also has
a side quest that is unique to him or her, and you cannot accomplish
the side quest without this character being in your party at the
time you attempt it. Unlike Dungeon Siege 1, there are side quests
to be undertaken if you so choose, more on this later.

In another departure from its predecessor, in
Dungeon Siege II you can raise a pet to fight alongside you as one
of your three companions. Each type of pet has various skills, and
depending on what it is fed, varies in enhancement. I have to
confess that this was a highlight of the game for me. You have a
variety of pets to pick from and purchase, and then you must feed
this baby appropriate items until it reaches maturity. It was a
wonderful way to get rid of surplus inventory, and entertaining to
watch it gobble them up in glee. I laughed hysterically to watch the
ice elemental pet barreling after my team as a baby. I love humor in
my RPGs (Role Playing Games), and there is little enough of it in
this one, so you have to grab it where you can find it. The
expressions of the pets as they eat are different from one another.
Kudos to the developer who obviously spent a large amount of time
working on this aspect of the game. Endearing as infants, the pets
often grow to be formidable, and at least twice saved my party from
annihilation. At any point you can dismiss them as you can your
other party members, or you are offered the option of allowing them
to go free, and you will never see them again, not even waving
goodbye. But I digress.

True fans of hack and slash RPGs will be in their
element with this game, for there are continual onslaughts from
hordes of creatures, and they also respawn. Some of this was
annoying because of the sheer numbers you have to wade through to
get anywhere, and you can’t take time to view the lovely and
detailed surroundings. Some were amusing, like the dancing Hak’u
tribesmen and the funny gaited Boggrots, but sometimes less is more.
While this was a mostly entertaining game, by Act 3 I was frankly
ready for it to be over. And I had just thought I had seen a lot of
enemies, for towards the end, someone really opened the gates.

There is only one level of game play difficulty in
the initial go-round, and better yet would be the ability to choose
from easy to very difficult. As it stands, the one level was
frustratingly hard for newbies and way too easy for veterans. The
point-and-click movement is effective, but I promise that you will
get a tired clicking finger before you are through. Sometimes a
particularly difficult adversary would appear with no rhyme or
reason as to why the difficulty level was suddenly increased.
Sometimes the foes were killed like swatting flies, but it became a
seemingly never-ending battle.

On the same theme of less is more, I littered the
countryside with loot I didn’t bother to pick up. There was so much
of it, I didn’t even bother to see if it was better than the
equipment I already had. I only needed money to buy potions, which I
did have to stock in huge amounts. There also seemed to be little
benefit from enchanting anything, as the enchanted items weren’t as
good as those you picked up from defeated enemies. Again, it was
useful to have surplus only to feed my pets.

Something I did like was that whatever your party
was equipped with, it showed on the screen. There was much detail
and color to the various items, and I enjoyed the glow and sparkle
to the various robes and weapons. There was also a very helpful
chart which showed how the new equipment would affect a character’s
statistics, and I played with that for some time.

Speaking of what is helpful, the journal is
essentially well laid out to assist you in the game. Your objectives
are laid out in a straightforward manner, from primary goals to
secondary quests, and each step you take towards a particular goal
is checked off as it is accomplished. This is very nice if you leave
the game for a time, and have a senior moment upon your return as to
where in the heck you are and what you are doing. Also in the
journal is a list of specialized items that you have gathered, a
Bestiary of monsters you have killed, and a handbook of how to play
the game, if you could possibly have questions after the in-game
tutorial. With all that incredible attention to detail, you might
think the map would follow suit in a likewise excellent manner. Not!
This map is so worthless one wonders why it was included. To be
fair, there is a mini-map also, which appears on your game screen of
much, much better quality. This small map indicates direction and
where you must go to reach your objective, along with very helpful
blue markings to show hidden areas or treasure, red dots to show
enemies, and green dots to indicate friendlies. The quarrel I have
with it is that it is too small in scope.

Another annoying aspect of the game is the abysmal
save system. You have one save point, and earlier saves are
overwritten. Not only are you unable to go back to a previous saved
game and try a new tactic, if you encounter a bug in the game, your
game is over. Granted there are few bugs in the game, but there is
one that can be a game ending one, resulting I believe from clicking
through dialogue too quickly, which results in quests being broken
that are necessary for the game to be completed. To the developer’s
credit, a patch was quickly produced to fix this problem. I hate to
whine, but I prefer to save my game, and then return to where I was
when I finished play previously. However, with this game you are
returned to the town teleporter nearest to where you were playing,
rather than the same location you left. It is boring and frustrating
to have to backtrack through already covered terrain, especially
with all the respawned monsters, to get to the point where you left
the game the time before.

However, the teleporters themselves are well done,
and it is immensely more interesting to look at an array of stars as
you warp through the galaxy, rather than looking at a loading screen
as you change locations. This gives you an impression of fairly
seamless game play.

You move the mouse to rotate your view, and can
zoom in or out with your scrolling button. Most of the time this is
very effective, unless you happen to get behind a wall when your
party begins a battle without you. Some fast shuffling will be in
order there!

Something strange that I encountered was
completing a quest, and then (possibly because of some negligence on
my part), finding myself in a location far away without one of my
party members. For some reason she was admiring a cave at the
previous location, picking daisies perhaps, and was killed before I
could hasten back to assist her. Several hours of game play were
lost, unless I wanted to resurrect her, which I didn’t. I had this
problem several times. On boarding one of the dryad lifts, one of
the members would charge off in the other direction, and the lift
would leave without him. One can only speculate why he had to rush
off like that – there weren’t enemies to kill.

Sometimes a dialogue would be cut short when
enemies attacked. The conversation wouldn’t be repeated, and you are
left pondering whether some information of import was lost to you
forever. I enjoy dialogue anyway, and it was annoying when the
little that was there disappeared. Realistic perhaps to cut people
off in mid-sentence when they are attacked, but not appreciated by
this writer.

Another negative were the quests. Although I
appreciate that DS II was much improved from DS1 in having quests,
the quests were lifeless and ho-hum. In the main game you have a
plethora of caves to visit and scads of monsters to kill, and the
quests really don’t vary from the same scenario. The caves and the
monsters look alike. One quest that showed promise -- speaking to
the dead and setting them free -- deteriorated into finding them and
that was that. It would have been better here if something more had
been required of the player, such as finding the dead person’s
killer, a lost love or item, anything but hearing over and over
about the distant shores. I was ready to kill them all over again,
if I had been given that opportunity.

By and large though, the voiceovers were
excellent, and I would have appreciated more dialogue. The dialogues
were full of drama, and none of the voiceovers sounded like the
actors were reading a tedious script to escape being tortured, as is
so often the case in games.

The ambient sound in the game is outstanding, from
rushing water to the clash of weapons. It is utterly immersing, and
acts to make your journey almost lifelike. What is disappointing is
the score. Although the game begins with a dramatic theme song, the
music dwindles. At some points of the game it is lovely, at other
times mundane or nonexistent.

The cut scenes are cinematic in quality, and from
the beginning they serve you notice that you are playing a game to
be reckoned with. The story is compelling, well-written and does not
disappoint those of us who longed for a story springing from its
predecessor.

Summing it up

“I want you to take my medallion. Please, it’s
important to me- more than you know.”

Fans of hack and slash RPGs should be in their
element with this game. The problem I had with it was mainly that
this could have been a classic but for some annoying features. It is
superior to its predecessor in many ways, with mostly wonderful
innovations and a few irritants. If this franchise takes those
things into consideration and develops a third to the series --
world look out!